Alice in Wonderland 3D

A sadly underwritten script

Tim Burton has walked the well-trodden path before. He’s successfully relaunched Batman, tripped over a torch holding-hand in the sand attempting to re-imagine Planet of the Apes and triumphantly returned to the source in remaking Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

And this time, with his reworking of Alice in Wonderland it appears as though he’s nibbled on the cake that says “EAT ME” and shrunk below the table that had the script sitting on it, forcing him to then wing-it from memory.

The problem with Alice is out-and-out the underwritten script. There are next to none of the Lewis Carroll style twisting of tongues and semantics. No warped logic and circumlocutive reasoning from the cast of tweaked crazies that confuse and beguile the now twenty-year-old Alice as she returns to the world she had been convinced was a dream. What’s she doing there?  And why doesn’t the White Queen (Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married) have anything to do?

There are a few scenes that have glimpses as to what Alice might have been. The amusingly confusing scene as Alice first encounters Tweedle-Dee (Matt Lucas – Little Britain) and Tweedle-Dum (Matt Lucas – Little Britain), and the Um, from Umbria sequence where Alice fudges her identity and becomes the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter) new favorite are two instances where Burton allows the characters time to spend with each other.

Johnny Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter is uneven and misses the mark, while other characters feel underused or seem to have unclear motivations.  There are wonderful glimpses of lunacy from the March Hare (Paul Whitehouse – The Fast Show), candelabra holding monkeys and a coterie of artificially enhanced hangers-on, but lunacy alone can’t carry the film.

Otherwise it was spectacularly and sumptuously a rather empty feast. A bit Return to Oz. Visually dense and imaginative, the usual Burton attention to detail in creating a warped and wacky world has never been more evident, and things clipped-along at fast enough pace that I can’t say I wasn’t entertained. But I wasn’t thrilled.

The 3D itself is an interesting conundrum. The colours are far less bright due to the sunglasses and the slight flicker in the projection is particularly evident when fine details are coupled with movement to produce an eye-watering motion blur. As to whether it takes you further into the cartoonish fantasy world is subjective, but I found it distracting.

Rating: 6/10

• Director: Tim Burton.

• Homepage: Disney Pictures

• Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Matt Lucas, Anne Hathaway.